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- Ben Hodgkinson joins Red Bull from Mercedes, where he has worked as technical director for Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains for the past two decades.
- The Red Bull engine program is the Austrian beverage manufacturer’s largest investment since the F1 team was founded in 2005.
- Red Bull will take over all staff and equipment from Honda’s Milton Keynes operations and will house them in a facility on the Red Bull campus.
Red Bull’s new Red Bull Powertrains Division has appointed Ben Hodgkinson as technical director. The British engineer was previously the technical manager at Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains (HPP), which builds the Mercedes F1 engines.
Hodgkinson’s primary focus will be on developing Red Bull’s first non-Honda engine, slated for 2025.
Hodgkinson has been with Mercedes for more than 20 years and goes back to working with Ilmor Engineering. A graduate of University College London, he first worked with rally tuning company Mountune and worked on Ford’s World Rally Championship engines before moving to Advanced Engine Research where he was part of the team that developed a turbo engine that MG used in the Le Mans 24 hours. He then moved to Ilmor, where he designed parts for the Honda Indy Racing League engine before moving to the Formula 1 program, where he worked on the design and development of the internal combustion engine for the current F1 engines.
“The decision to leave HPP after nearly 20 years was not an easy one, but the opportunity to take on such a far-reaching and important project is a great honor,” he said. “Red Bull is a serious player in Formula 1 and has been our greatest rival in the hybrid era. I look forward to seeing what we can achieve together in this new phase of the corporate journey.”
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Red Bull’s engine program is the Austrian beverage company’s largest investment since the F1 team was founded in 2005. The decision to become an engine manufacturer was made after Honda decided to leave F1 in late 2021 and Red Bull found itself without it an engine partner. While it could have forced an existing engine maker to provide engines, doing so would have been counterproductive as Red Bull’s goal is to win and its long-standing weakness has been that it was at the mercy of its engine suppliers.
The details of the Honda deal are secret, but sources told Autoweek that it not only gives Red Bull independence from the need to be a partner or customer, but also more political power within the sport, especially when there are customer teams outside of AlphaTauri, what may be the case in the future.
Red Bull team boss Christian Horner will be able to control the engine program more precisely in-house.
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In the meantime, however, the intellectual property acquired by Honda cannot be used otherwise, for example to offset costs by selling the knowledge to manufacturers so that they can build their own engines of the same name. This could be something McLaren, Aston Martin, and Alfa Romeo might have been interested in.
Red Bull will take over all of the staff and equipment from the Japanese company Milton Keynes and place them in a facility on the Red Bull campus. This means that, alongside Ferrari, Red Bull will be the only team in Formula 1 that integrates everything in the same location.
It’s a big undertaking, but it will mean that in the future, Red Bull will have a turnkey asset that can be sold to any company that wants to get involved in sports and the automotive business if at some point Red Bull wants to Grand Prix – End the race.
By the time the new F1 rules arrive in 2025, Red Bull will be able to design, manufacture and build its own engines independently of Honda. From then on, Red Bull may be able to provide engines for other teams. in fact this might be required. The company may also want to sell its intellectual property to an OEM.
The word is that Red Bull will do the job properly as expected and that the new engine division will have up to six test stands in the facility which is currently under construction in the heart of the Red Bull Technology Campus in Milton Keynes, England.
“Ben’s appointment signals our long-term intent.”
“We are very happy to welcome Ben as Technical Director at Red Bull Powertrains,” said Christian Horner, Team Principal of Red Bull to lead like-minded team of highly qualified engineers.
“When Red Bull announced the creation of Red Bull Powertrains, it also heralded a new phase in the company’s Formula 1 ambitions to take all aspects of car design and take our destiny into our own hands. The ultimate expression of this is the development of a Red Bull engine that meets the next generation regulations for Formula 1 engines. Ben’s appointment signals our long-term intent and we will support him and his team with all available resources necessary for success. “
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